Americain 2015finds itselfalmost in a newenergyreality. It recently became theworld’ssecond-largest extractor of crude oil,
and since 2010 has been the leading producer of natural gas,whoseabundant and
inexpensive supply has been accelerating the retreat from coalas a national
source of electric power.

Some seethis as the beginning of an even bigger transition, one in whichAmerica’sdominantstatus as aproducer of
hydrocarbonsendsits allies’dependence on Russian gas andmakesOPEC
terminally irrelevant,whileits entrepreneurial drive helps itquickly
advanceto harnessrenewablesand reducegreenhouse gas emissions.

All of this sounds too good to be true — and it is. Indefensible
claims of imminent transformative breakthroughs are an unfortunately chronic
ingredient of Americanenergy debates.

WhenAmerican
leaders talk about energy transitions, they tend to sell them as something thatcan be
accomplished in a matter of years. Al Gore, perhaps the country’s most
prominentclimateactivist,proposed to “re-power” America, making its electricity carbon-free,
within 10 years, calling the goal “achievable, affordable and transformative.”That was in 2008,when fossil fuels produced 71percentof American electricity; last year67 percent still came fromburning fossil fuels.

President Barack Obama, who has a strong rhetorical dislike of oil — although kerosene distilled from it fuels the 747 that carries him to play golf in Hawaii — promised in his 2011 State of the Union message that the country would have 1 million electric cars by 2015. That goal was abandoned by the Department of Energy just two years later.

For years, even decades, we have been on the verge of mass deployment of (take your pick) fast breeder reactors, of coal-fired electricity generating plants that capture and sequester all of their CO2, of fuel cell-powered cars running on hydrogen, if not a complete hydrogen economy. We’ve been promised electric cars that will not only cost nothing to run but will also power houses while sitting in garages; or microorganisms genetically engineered to ooze gasoline.

The reality of energy transitions is very different. Too many modern observers have become misled by the example of electronics, in which advances have followed Moore’s law — the now 50-year-old prediction that the number of components on a microchip will double every 18 months. This has allowed exceptionally rapid progress. But the fundamental physical realities that determine progress of energy systems do not behave that way: they are improving steadily, but far more slowly. Moore’s law implies an exponential growth rate of 46 percent a year. The analogues in energy are not even close: Since 1900, the efficiency of electricity generation in large power plants has been rising by less than 2 percent a year, advances in lighting have boosted its efficiency by less than 3 percent a year, and the energy cost of steel, our civilization’s most essential metal, has been falling by less than 2 percent a year.

Moore’s Law means performance doubles in a year and a half. Change at the rate of energy systems means doubling efficiencies, or halving the costs, in 35 years — a vastly longer timespan.

These things might sound technical. They are not. Accepting this reality is essential in order to chart a path for lasting progress: sensible policies cannot be built on mistaken beliefs or on wishful thinking. In the conversation about America’s — and the world’s — energy future, reality demands we keep a few important principles in mind.

Undoubtedly, the U.S. is experiencing two notable energy
transitions, from coal to natural gas and from fossil fuels to new renewables
in electricity generation. Theseshifts are
welcome because they promise to bring cleaner and less carbon-intensive
supplies. But they cannot be rapid, and they bring their own technical,
economic and social challenges.Energy infrastructure is the world’s most elaborate and expensive,
andthe longevity and inertia of many large energy enterprises make it
impossible for any large, complex national system(to say
nothing ofthe global level) to reconfigureitselfeven in three or four decades.

How sloware these transitions, really?To answer this
question Irecently undertook a comprehensive study ofenergy
transitions–- bothat the global level and for the world’s major economies (U.S.,
China, Japan, Russia, U.K.,France)— for a period of 150 years. Starting withthe epochal
move from woodto coal that defined the second half of the 19thcentury, through the morerecent shiftsfrom fossil
fuels to renewableslikewind turbines andsolarcells, I measuredhow long ittypicallytakesfor a particular energy source to go from 5 percent of the market
(that is,more than a negligible contribution) to claimlarge shares(25 percent to
30 percent) of total energy supply.

The repeated answeris that it
takes decadesof gradual penetration. After crude oil claimed 5 percent of the
totalAmericanenergy supplyin 1905,it took 28 years to reach 25 percent, and the rise wasevenslower for
natural gas, 33 years from 1924 to 1957.Today, despite
the attention lavished on solar cellsand wind,
thoseup-and-coming renewableshave yet to
reach even the 5 percent mark.

Globally,energy transitionshavebeenevenslower than in the U.S., withcrude oil
taking40yearsto go from 5 percent to 25 percentof the global
primary energy supply, and it looksas thoughnatural gaswill take60 yearsto do the
same.

Coal’s decline from being the source of half of the U.S.
electricity in 2005 to less than two-fifths in 2015 has been the result of aninevitable process
of closing down coal-fired power plants(due to their
age and new mercury and air toxics standards),accelerated by
the availability of cheap natural gas. But thisdoes not mean
animminent end of coal.In absolute
terms, coal combustion in U.S.power plants willhavedeclinedby only 2 percent between 2013 and 2015,and it is
projected to be down by another 0.6 percent by the end of 2016—hardly a
precipitous drop.

Electricity generation by new renewables has been growing fastest,butit is far from
taking over: at 7 percent in 2014 it wasstill only
about a third of all electricity generated bythe agingnuclear
stations. And because electricity is only a part of the overall energy supply,the
contribution of new renewables(wind and solar)to thecountry’s total primary energy consumption (including all
industrial and transportation fuels)remains very
modest: it rose from just 0.1 percent in the year 2000to 1 percent
in 2010 and to2.2 percent in 2014.

The U.S. is still an overwhelmingly fossil-fueled society, albeit
a bit less so than it was a generation ago. Even if the new renewables keep on
advancing at the same rateas they have been so far—a rate hardto maintain as
the aggregatesolar and windcapacities to be installed every year get progressively larger—fossil fuels
would be supplying 78 percent of the U.S. primary energy in 2030 and still
about 75 percent by 2040.

Our increasingly electrified, electronic and data-driven society places steadily rising demand on reliable baseload power — that is, on electricity available 24/7/365. Servers never sleep, nor does air conditioning during hot nights, and in Asia’s megacities subways and electric trains take only brief naps between midnight and 5 a.m.

Electricity generating plants burning coal or natural gas or fissioning uranium can be run all night, or all winter, to supply baseload power, with nuclear reactors operating about 90 percent of the time. Not so wind turbines: they generate electricity only while sufficiently strong wind is blowing (and hence work 25-35 percent of the hours available every year).

Photovoltaicsolargeneration peaks around noon under clear skiesandstops later in
the day. Both wind and sun experiencesmajor seasonal
downturns.For example,thenorthern Plains are America’s windiest region,but in winter— when the
electricity is needed most through cold and short days—the Arctic air
formssemi-stationary high pressure cellsthat producelow
temperatures and calm winds.

The only way to negate these longer-lasting wind and solar lows is to bank the electricity generated during sunny and windy days — and that means massive, grid-scale storage. Our batteries are getting better, but the only commercially available massive (gigawatt-scale) electricity storage is still a 19th-century technique first commercially deployed during the 1890s: pumping water up to a mountain reservoir with cheaper nighttime electricity, and then releasing it during the hours of high daily demand. (This practice results in a net energy loss of about 25 percent and, obviously, it cannot be used in flat regions.) More than anything else, electricity storage is the key technical breakthrough needed if the new renewables are to claim a substantial share of primary energy in modern electricity-intensive economies, but the progress will be, as it has been, slow and incremental.

America tends to assume Silicon Valley-style innovators can drive
quick and transformative changes, buteven Silicon
Valley’s would-be masters of theuniverse have
discovered thatenergy
transitions are subject to time spans and technical constraints that defy their
reach. Google launched its “Clean
Energy 2030”in October 2008, aiming toeliminate U.S.
use of coal and oil for electricity generation by 2030,and cut oil
use for cars by 44percent. It was completely abandoned in November 2011.

Elon Musk, the entrepreneursome U.S.
media have proclaimed to be aman more inventive than Edison,makes much-praised
electric cars—but Tesla ended 2014 with another loss after selling only 17,300
vehicles in a market of 16.5 million units, claiming a share of 0.1 percent of
the U.S. car market.Obviously, it will take many years before Tesla becomes anything
but a market curiosity. What then is the best course to follow? Not a single route,but a
combination of advances.

First, even after more than a century of improvements,all fossil
fuel conversions can be madesubstantiallymore efficient and work with reduced environmental impacts. But
these solutions must go beyond the converters themselves: we already have
97-percent-efficient natural gas furnaces, but their full benefit can be
realized only in superinsulated houses withtriple
windows; and the benefits ofcleanerandmore efficient car engines will be largely negated as long as
people drive ever-more massive SUVs.

Second,the desirabledevelopment of new renewables should not be guided by wishful
preferences and arbitrary targets (30 percentgenerated bywind by 2030),but it should
proceedat adetermined butmeasured pace that would ensure lasting benefits.

Third,beneath (or above) this allis the
fundamental question of what is the energy use for. If itis to enablelong, healthy
and productive lives in safe and caring societies,then the U.S.
has not done a very good job. America’s per capita energy use is nearly twice
as high as in Germany, France or Japan, but America’s health care and
educational achievements and subjective satisfactionwith life are
not twice the EU or Japanese level: indeed, in many of these measures the U.S.
does not place even among the world’stop 20countries. Using moreenergy,albeit more efficiently and with lower
specific environmental effects by
deploying new conversion techniques, is unlikely to change the country’s
fortunes — but no serious consideration hasbeen given to how to use less,much less. Indeed, such a suggestion seems to
be entirely subversive, and quintessentially unAmerican.